


Imperfections

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Pet Shop of Horrors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-07
Updated: 2007-12-07
Packaged: 2018-01-25 06:57:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1637735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Papa D's latest experiment produces an unexpected outcome. Sofu D gets an earful of biology. D dresses up. (D x Leon)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Imperfections

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to qwerty the xsmoonshine for beta and comments. Any mistakes which remain are entirely mine. 
> 
> Written for Nimori

 

 

The Ancestor

With the last of his strength, he bequeathed his memories to the son he was about to bring forth into the world.

_Remember, my son. This is what the humans did to our people. All to sooth the wounded pride of a warrior prince, the upstart who thought himself worthy of one of us, be she nothing more than a lowly priestess of the clan._

Remember, my child. Their hatred. Their bloodlust. Our sorrow. Our anger. Our thirst for revenge.

\----------------------------------------

The Father

The interview went well. He did not have a hard time convincing the head of the lab. _Humans are so gullible_ , D thought as he reached for the phone in his hotel room.

He dialed. Four rings, and then the familiar refrain.

"Count D's pet shop. How may I help you?"

He took a deep breath. This was not going to be easy. The parent could be batty sometimes. It was most probably the pressure of having to raise a child and run a shop all on one's own. And the loneliness. Yes, one could get lonely, even when surrounded by a variety of creatures and a child, and lately, a grandchild as well.

"Father, I am not going to come home for a while."

"Yes?" Came the non-committal reply.

So far, so good. He took the plunge. "They have an excellent research lab here in Albany. I've been accepted as an exchange student."

"Oh, really?" The testiness was starting to creep in, and steadily increased as the voice on the other end warmed up. D braced himself and chirped in a response as soon as the parent paused to restock his lungs, "Of course I will come back for my son after I've settled in. You have your hands full running the business, and -," only to find himself interrupted before the end of the second sentence.

It was only one or two paragraphs later that D found another opportunity to participate in the conversation. "What do you mean by that? I'll take good care of him, just as you did of me."

He listened patiently to another long tirade on the other side of the line, in which the words "sarcasm" and "unfit parent" were frequently invoked. Then he reciprocated with an equally lengthy argument on the matter of the custody. But in his sinking heart, he was already accepting what he knew would be the inevitable outcome of the discussion.

"All right. Good night, Father."

And the click, D knew, marked the beginning of a long silence.

\----------------------------------------

The Grandfather

He should have seen this coming. Q-chan's wings flapped furiously as he took in the scene. _That silly son of mine!_ All the while before the ingrate ran off to New York, he had been spouting some far-fetched ideas about seeds and beans and Red Queens. Q-chan regretted letting books baby-sit his son while he was busy minding the shop and its wards. He was not sure who he should blame for _this_ , Mendel or Carroll.

The sight of the spare had frightened his poor grandson to the core. No, Q-chan corrected himself. The female version of D who had appeared at the pet shop was more than just the usual spare. His son, that is, the current Count D's father, had overstepped the boundaries this time.

Well, Q-chan comforted himself, at least this confirmed that twenty-two years ago, he had made the right decision concerning the custody of his grandchild.

Later, after they had taken care of the orangutan, Q-chan came to a decision. He waited until the detective arrived (for some reason, D was easily distracted by the detective). Then he went off to pay the source of the trouble a visit.

\----------------------------------------

The Kids

It was evening, barely a few hours after the incident with the orangutan. Apparently, on death, the spare had reverted to what she originally was before Papa D had started with her.

Although he had been initially alarmed at her arrival, D's sympathy was awakened towards the end. She had been raised just to provide the parts, in the event that D ever needed them. But what made it worse, in D's mind, was that she had been truthfully told the reason behind her existence, it seemed, every single day of it.

 _How would I have felt in her place?_ He pushed the looming image of a Father he barely remembered behind the door labeled 'Keep Out', and announced to the guest and wards in the kitchen of the pet shop: "The wound that I must heal is very deep." The statement also fit in nicely as an answer to Chris' question about the content of his glass.

 _Will I ever heal?_ D asked himself as he licked the last drop of the medicine from his lips.

He rinsed the glass in the sink and wondered if he was over-reacting. After all, his father did leave the pet shop to pursue the twin dreams of bringing back the clan and making the humans pay for The Massacre. D winced as the faintly-remembered slogan, "Restore the clan, overthrow the humans!" resounded along the passage leading from the door labeled 'Keep Out'. Instead of feeling put upon, he should feel honored that he had been chosen as the beneficiary of this particular experiment, which must have been the culmination of years of research.

 _Oh dear._ What was he thinking? _Sarcasm is the province of Leon Orcot._ As he turned off the tap and dried the glass, he glanced at the detective, who, easy-going as ever, was baiting T-chan with a piece of bacon.

"Come get it, you goat! This tastes much better than my jeans, ya know?"

D smiled. _If only he knew. Leon has never seen T-chan feed...._

And what had the detective said about "Countess D"? "It's kinda strange that I'd find her attractive. After all, she looked just like you. Ah well. The difference a nice pair of jugs can make."

The compliment had evoked an inexplicable feeling in D. A strange mix of revulsion and attraction, which was not unlike having butterflies lounge on the outside and moths crawling on the inside of one's body - all at the same time.

D did not understand this feeling that humans called 'love'. Not in the way the humans experienced it, no. He understood it as an evolutionary force which enabled them to replenish their numbers, but that was the extent of his understanding.

Still, he wondered. It must have been that way with his people too, thousands of years ago. They were not originally clones, based on what he knew from his grandfather. Did 'love', or rather, the ability to 'love', die with The Ancestor, who himself must have expired in hate and sorrow? Perhaps it was lost during the duplication process. Maybe the duplication process was imperfect by itself.

 _Imperfect. Just like me_ , D thought as he replaced the glass in the shelf.

Later, after T-chan and Pon-chan had escorted Chris to his bedroom, D came to a decision. He was going to learn about 'love'.

"Could I have a moment of your time, Mr. Detective?"

On the sofa, Leon stretched comfortably. "What'sa matter, you wanna give me more weird plants or another butterfly to take home?"

D laced his fingers together and brought them up to his chin as he studied this particular specimen of the human species. At first glance, it was not a below-average specimen, but a faint nagging voice made itself heard nevertheless: _Couldn't I have done better?_ No, D was determined to proceed with the plan. He was going to find out what this 'love' thing was all about. But, the teacher being Leon Orcot, D half-suspected that the subject of the lesson would be more of carnal knowledge than love. Not that D had much experience of the former either, at least not in the practical sense. Well, the time for doing was now. D had observed enough to know how things were done. Stone-collecting was not the only thing the penguins, Messrs. Jab and Pierce, did to while away the time.

"Yes, yes! But you'll have to come with me to the back of the shop."

"Sure. Not that I have much to do this evening anyway."

D led Leon through one of the double doors into a chamber easily twice the size of the detective's apartment. The moon looked in insolently via the ornate window next to the four-poster bed.

Strange, Leon thought. Was the moon supposed to be full that night?

"Please have a seat while you wait, Mr. Detective," D said, gesturing to the lavish sofa.

\----------------------------------------

The Red Queen

The tea was offered and poured into dainty little cups; the boxes of cakes and desserts were opened and their contents arranged on equally dainty plates. After obligatory remarks about the length of time that had passed since they last met (twenty-two years), Sofu D got down to business.

"Son, you need to stop treating people like laboratory mice. I'll have you know that the grandson was quite flabbergasted by the new spare."

Across the steadily vanishing confectionaries, the host turned his gaze reluctantly from the limited-edition truffle mud cake.

"Oh dear. She has been missing since yesterday..."

"This one was particularly over-anxious to meet her brother. Care to tell me what makes her different from the other spares? Is it what I think it is?"

"Father, you know my thoughts on the viability of our line. Genetic material is such a fragile thing. No reproduction technique can safeguard against damage, especially over millennia."

Sofu D's golden eyes blazed. Not again, he thought. Despite the supply of energy laid right in front him, he did not feel up to the same old heated argument. Maybe it was the form he was taking. He preferred to let the younger ones think that being a cute bat-like creature consumed more energy than being human-shaped, but that was not strictly true.

"Now, we've been through this already, years ago. It is impossible to reproduce a true daughter, and you know why..."

"Because The Ancestor was male?" Papa D cut in impatiently. "Damn imprinting, and damn the ZW sex determination system. Asexual reproduction can only do so much good, and we need to keep running just to stay in one place. With what we are doing now, we are merely standing still. We need a way to shuffle the genetic code...."

Sofu D's eyes crossed, as they always did when his son stopped making sense. And then, as usual in that situation, he closed his ears and opened his mouth.

"We have been duplicating ourselves since The Massacre, and we will continue to, as long as our life's work requires us to. Or until we die out."

His son seemed more relentless than ever this time. Sofu D noticed that the mud cake remained untouched.

"Father, even before I joined the molecular genetics lab in Albany, I saw the future. How the end of our line will come about. And don't do that cross-eyed thing again. You know how fragile my son is. It is a deleterious mutation which is going to be passed down to _my_ grandchild, and so on. Unless we do something about the way we reproduce, we are going to become extinct before our thirst for revenge is fulfilled."

"Which is why we have spares, son. Although it is not a practice I particularly approve of. My own father..."

"I know how you feel about the favoritism, Father. But no, this is not just about my son. The mutation occurred some time back, when keeping spares were either not feasible or people were just plain lazy. Your grandfather, perhaps."

"So... all of the spares also have the same - " Sofu D was finding it hard to pronounce the word " - imperfections?"

"I think we all have them, Father, down from then. It's just that my son is afflicted more profoundly."

"Hrmph," Sofu D cautiously uncrossed his eyes and ventured, "Then I don't see the point of making _that_ particular spare for my grandson." _If my reading of your intentions is correct,_ he added to himself.

"It seemed worth the try, since each of us still owns a good copy of that gene," his son replied, delicately popping the last of the cake into his mouth. "Because of the mechanism of recombination, every offspring which is reproduced sexually is an experiment. The ability to adapt to environmental changes is conferred..."

Sofu D had had a whole lifetime of practice. It had been a long time since he last meditated while being human-shaped. Self-hypnosis was the best defense against Papa D's lectures. Sofu D had perfected the technique up to the point where cakes and sweets still got eaten even while Papa D, oblivious to Sofu D's blank smile, ploughed on.

"... my old mentor in Albany had this pet theory: the most ancient form of sex might have occurred when an organism produced an intact version of its own DNA in order to repair the damaged version."

Sofu D's gaze softened as he savored the last of the strawberry-flavored egg tarts. This son was eccentric, yes, but perhaps he had meant well after all? But there was the matter of the orangutan.

"What a heartless thing to do to the poor creature," he admonished, after giving his son the details of what happened that afternoon. "She was just a child!"

"Oh dear. I should erase the capability to resent and envy," Papa D said. At the look from Sofu D, he hastily added: "Just in the spares."

When no reply was forthcoming from Sofu D, Papa D went on ruefully: "I was hoping that my son would find her attractive. Well, perhaps he would, if she had been fully grown. I had not meant for them to meet so soon."

"Find her attractive? He was terrified of her."

With that, and some irrelevant gossips about past and current customers, father and son parted company. As he made his way home, Sofu D thought of this conversation, and of conversations in other places and times, and realized just how much he had mellowed throughout the years.

\----------------------------------------

Plumage

D hurried to another chamber not unlike the one he left the detective in. He stood in front of a dressing table, twin to the one in the previous room. Residents of the pet shop who happened to be passing by could hear vexed mutterings.

"The rouge, the rouge. The one Sui-Oh brought when she visited Grandfather...."

"Eeeek! Too much! I look like a Qing era rent-boy!"

There were also sounds of drawers being pulled and pushed back impatiently.

"Where is the silk scarf the Snake Couple bartered for the incense? Hmmph."

And more rummaging later: "Perfume from the woman on the moon! Perfect. I've been waiting for an occasion to put it to use."

Suddenly, there was a cry of dismay. Pon-chan could resist no longer and peered in. Her eyes widened in amazement.

"This won't do!" D, clad in his usual underclothes, was wailing to the mirror on the dressing table. "They are the reasons he admitted his feelings so openly, and yet they don't look - authentic in this garment...."

There was a gentle tug at his fingers. D looked down. "Oh, Pon-chan."

"Hiroshi-kun may have what you need, Count," Pon-chan said helpfully. "The bird is always hanging around clotheslines in the suburbs, and has very nimble claws."

A look of relief shone in D's eyes. He put down the causes of his now-solved problem on the dressing table.

Pon-chan eyed the objects curiously. "May I ask, Count - "

"Noyoumaynot," came the flustered reply. "Now, Pon-chan, would you be a good badger and go borrow the necessary, ah, piece from Hiroshi-kun's collection?"

\----------------------------------------

Several rooms away, Leon was pacing up and down, exercising his detective skills to their utmost. What did the dastardly Count want with him? He was almost sure that it had something to do with his remarks about the Count's sister. Or maybe it was his earlier conduct with the Count's sister. Okay, misconduct, but Leon was only attempting to ascertain that the Count was not masquerading as his own sister in order to play with Leon's mind. And what better way to do the ascertaining than to examine the, ah, chest?

Leon was distracted from his thoughts by a whiff of perfume. He turned towards the entrance. The sight of Countess D, elegantly clad in subdued grey brocade which showcased every nuance of her slim, hourglass figure, took his breath away. So it was true what they say about moonlight and love.

The Countess shyly adjusted the scarf around her shoulders and approached him, all the while keeping her eyes downcast. _But didn't D say that she had gone back to their father's place?_ Leon cursed the policeman in him, who would not go off shift.

"Hey, aren't you supposed to have gone home? What are you doing here?" The words burst out, because Leon knew that if he did not say them now, they would never get said.

_Damn you Leon! A beautiful lady you fancy looks like she is about to offer herself to you, and your reaction is to interrogate her? This is why you never get any aside from Ms. Thumb and her daughters._

The Countess ignored his question and glided until she was right in front of him. And Leon, giddy from the scent, and the blood rushing to his head and other extremities, gave a nervous laugh when he realized that he was actually starting to shuffle backwards.

 _Steady, man_ , he admonished himself. He let his hands fall gently on her shoulders, and drew her into his embrace. He felt a pair of soft hands on the back of his neck. She gazed up at him. Leon burned with moonlight-fueled desire. _Go for it, man!_

By the time the kiss broke and their eyes were open, Leon had realized that he was looking into the bastard D's eyes. He did not keep the discovery to himself.

"I do not know why excrement is particularly holy, or what that has to do with this situation, Mr. Detective" was D's pedantic response to Leon's brief outburst. He started to disengage himself from Leon's arms and stared down sadly at the treacherous part of his anatomy. "Well, your powers of observation are better than I thought. I guess this means that it is off - "

"Not so fast, D," Leon growled. He was strangely touched by the show of insecurity. This was the ever arrogant, self-assured Count D, who normally sneered down upon the whole of humanity from his lofty place in the animal kingdom.

But more importantly, tonight he was not going to just go home to his posters of what D liked to term 'badly-proportioned women'. He tightened his grip on D, and silently thanked the sister, wherever she was now.

"You gotta finish what you started, you know," he said after the second kiss, and pushed a wide-eyed D onto the bed.

\----------------------------------------

D, on the other hand, was silently giving thanks to the penguins. Mr. Jab, the ostensibly dominant (and sharper) half of the couple, never realized just how often he had been taken in by Mr. Pierce's artful ploys for sympathy and thus, sex.

He purred happily as his fingernails made their way down Leon's surprisingly smooth back.

\----------------------------------------

Q-chan, back in his compact form as a rabbit-bat hybrid, arrived home to an eerily quiet pet shop. His heart skipped a few beats at the thought that something was amiss. It would not be beneath that devious son of his to have some mischief-making minions visit the pet shop while distracting him, Sofu D, with tea and sweets and long-winded biology lectures a few miles away in the research complex.

He flew hurriedly to the back, and found almost all of the inhabitants crowded in front of one of the double doors, which was slightly ajar.

T-chan looked disgusted. He kept muttering: "What a waste of a perfect dessert! He has soiled the sweet taste of the world's rarest meat with his foul smoker's breath!"

Pon-chan was wringing her little hands excitedly, and Ten-chan's nine tails waggled to the beat of Pon-chan's whispering: "Finally! Finally!"

One of the Honlon sisters announced sagely, "So this is why Count D has been keeping him at the shop. He is so vigorous, despite all the cigarettes he smokes."

Q-chan did not think that he could contain his curiosity any longer. Careful to be as quiet as possible, he fluttered right to the edge of the door.

His grandson and Leon Orcot were on the bed, doing the very thing that Papa D had wished D would do with the female spare.

"Hum," Q-chan said to himself. "An unexpected outcome, certainly."

On second thoughts, Q-chan had to admit that it was all very natural, considering the detective's crush on Count D, which was obvious to everyone except the two principals. _The puzzling thing is,_ Q-chan thought, _why is there a pair of grapefruits on the floor beside the bed?_

 


End file.
